Tag Archives: Errol Flynn

Silver River, which was directed by Raoul Walsh, premiered in Denver on May 18, 1948, and in New York City two days later.

Walsh’s last couple of pictures — Pursued (1947) and Cheyenne (1947) — were both westerns. Silver River takes place after the Civil War, and it’s set in the west, but in terms of action, it doesn’t deliver what I look for in a western. It’s more of a drama, and in fact bears more resemblance to one of Warner’s gangster dramas that it does to a typical Warner Bros. western.

Like Little Caesar (1931), The Public Enemy (1931), and Scarface (1932), Silver River is about a man who takes control of anything and everything around him, wielding his own ruthlessness as a weapon.

Like every good gangster, Michael J. McComb (Errol Flynn) has a faithful right-hand man, “Pistol” Porter (Tom D’Andrea), and he lusts after a woman he can never really attain. And just like every other movie gangster, he finds that once he’s on top, he’s lonelier and more isolated than ever.

When the film begins, McComb is a captain in the Union Army. During the Battle of Gettysburg he burns a wagon-load of payroll money so Jeb Stuart and the Confederates won’t be able get their hands on it. He does this in defiance of an order, so he is court-martialed and dishonorably discharged.

McComb learns his lesson and says, “If there’s gonna be any shoving around, next time I’ll do it.”

So after a stint as a riverboat gambler — in which we get to see Flynn deliver a lot of smooth lines like, “…and speaking of charming ladies,” before he drops four Queens on the table to beat his opponent’s trio of Aces — he and his buddy Pistol move their operation to Silver City and open a casino. The casino rakes in cash hand over fist, which allows McComb to force his way into the Silver River Mining Company run by Stanley Moore (Bruce Bennett).

McComb’s lawyer, John Plato Beck (Thomas Mitchell), drunkenly warns McComb against the path he’s headed down, and invokes the Biblical story of King David and his obsession with Bathsheba.

After a number of Warner Bros. pictures starring Errol Flynn suffered costly delays when he became too drunk by the afternoon to continue, Jack Warner was determined that Flynn be kept under control, and he made it clear that any delay in filming due to Flynn’s inebriation would be met with legal action.

I don’t know if Flynn’s controlled but uninspired performance is directly related to his forced sobriety, but throughout the film he seems as if he’s just going through the motions. He hits his marks, but that’s about it. Walsh does a good job of controlling his star and keeping everything moving, but after the pyrotechnics of the opening sequence and the breezy charm of the riverboat gambling scenes, the film settles in for a long melodramatic slog, and there just wasn’t enough action to keep me interested. Worse, when there finally is some action to end the film, it feels like a betrayal of the narrative, and isn’t true to Flynn’s character’s arc.

Peter Godfrey’s Cry Wolf is a good-looking thriller with two great stars and an intriguing setup, but it never quite fulfills its promise, and eventually peters out with an ending that you can see coming a mile away.

Sandra claims she was married to Mark’s deceased nephew, James Caldwell Demarest (Richard Basehart). She says she was working toward her doctor’s degree in geology. Jim came to her as a friend and she helped him. She needed money. He needed his inheritance. (Jim and his sister Julie have money that is kept in trust until they are 30. If, however, Jim were to marry, control of his inheritance would immediately pass from Mark to Jim’s wife.)

Sandra tells Mark she knows he would have preferred to choose a wife for Jim himself — someone placid — and she assures Mark that she is not a placid girl.

Jim gave Sandra $2,000 to complete her studies and she was to divorce him in six months. There were no other strings. They were married five months before his death. She has come to collect his inheritance. Two thousand dollars has become $2 million.

Doubt and mistrust informs Sandra’s relationship with Mark. Mark isn’t convinced that Sandra’s marriage certificate is genuine, and Sandra suspects Mark is up to no good in his mysterious laboratory. Nevertheless, there are clearly romantic sparks between the two. Also, Mark’s niece Julie instantly becomes attached to Sandra, and begs her to stay.

So it’s a perfect setup for a Gothic thriller. Mark struts and preens about the house, a pipe clenched between his teeth, spitting out nasty one-liners like, “Next time you hear some odd noise in the night, just follow the memorable custom of your sex and stick your head under the bedclothes.” And Sandra gets to play at being a grown-up Nancy Drew, pulling herself up to Mark’s lab in a dumbwaiter and then hiding behind a door when he unexpectedly arrives, and later climbing along the eaves of the mansion and dropping down a skylight to spy on him.

Cry Wolf reminded me a lot of Vincente Minnelli’s Undercurrent (1946), which is another Gothic thriller about a not-terribly-romantic love triangle in which one-third of the equation is absent for most of the picture.

Like Undercurrent, Cry Wolf is competently put together, and it’s worth seeing if you like the film’s stars, but it never really takes flight. Franz Waxman’s musical score and Carl E. Guthrie’s cinematography are both top-notch, and add a good deal of suspense to the shadowy proceedings, but there’s only so far that atmosphere can take a picture. Ultimately, Cry Wolf is a mystery that’s not terribly mysterious.

San Antonio, directed by David Butler (with uncredited assistance from Robert Florey and Raoul Walsh), is a journeyman effort from start to finish. A lavish, Technicolor production, the film looks great, and its stuntwork and cinematography are top-notch. The final showdown, a three-way shootout staged at nighttime in the ruins of the Alamo, is especially well-done. But San Antonio never aspires to be anything more than middlebrow entertainment. It’s a star vehicle for Errol Flynn, a showcase for a couple of musical numbers by Alexis Smith, and not much more.

Flynn plays a rancher named Clay Hardin, one of the survivors of a vicious war that has raged for years between ranch owners and the rustlers who decimate their herds by running nightly raids and then rebranding and reselling the cattle at various points along the more than 1,000 miles of border that Texas shares with Mexico. Hardin was falsely branded a criminal, and when the film begins, we find him living in Mexico in exile. He finally has in his possession evidence that could clear his name, a tally book containing records of all the illegal cattle sales made by Roy Stuart (Paul Kelly), the cattle baron of San Antonio. With the tally book and his good friend Charlie Bell (John Litel), Hardin returns to San Antonio prepared to mete out justice. Along the way, he crosses paths with a singer named Jeanne Starr (Smith), as well as her attendant Henrietta (Florence Bates) and her roly-poly manager Sacha Bozic (S.Z. Sakall, who is curiously listed in the credits as “S.Z. ‘Cuddles’ Sakall”). Bozic and Henrietta provide comic relief in helpings that are a little too large, and Jeanne provides romantic interest and a couple of songs.

This wasn’t the first time Smith appeared opposite Flynn. The two starred together in Dive Bomber (1941) and Gentleman Jim (1942). I found their chemistry in San Antonio lukewarm. For a man who was reportedly a stone-cold freak in private, Flynn is remarkably wooden in many of his roles. In San Antonio he’s still working the “dashing” angle he perfected in Captain Blood (1935) and The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), but he looks closer to the “world weary” angle that he would later play to perfection in the excellent black and white western Rocky Mountain (1950).

San Antonio doesn’t drag, and it’s solid western entertainment. The production values are high, the action is well-staged, and Victor Francen delivers a juicy turn as a villain named Legare, but overall it’s just O.K., with a run-of-the-mill story and passable performances by the leads. If you love the music of the period, Smith’s performance of “Some Sunday Morning” will be a highlight, but if you’re a fan of more historically accurate westerns, the songs in the film date it about as badly as Flynn’s perfect coiffure and jaunty red neckerchief.

Errol Flynn was rejected for military service due to his enlarged heart, tuberculosis, morphine addiction, and bouts of malaria. But that didn’t stop him from making some kick-ass war movies.

Raoul Walsh, who made a number of fine films, directed this patriotic World War II action film starring Flynn as an Army Captain named Nelson. World War II junkies will enjoy the fact that Objective, Burma! features weapons, gear, and uniforms that are all original and accurate.

Of course, the story itself is not all that accurate. The British apparently objected when the film was released, since it took the basic story of an operation by British Chindits and retold it as an American operation. (Flynn, an Australian, seems to be playing an American in the film, though his accent is hard to place.) One of the producers, however, said that the film was also largely inspired by the 1940 film Northwest Passage, which took place during the French and Indian War. So, like a lot of Hollywood productions, it’s a war film that could just as easily have been a Western.

If you’re looking for historical accuracy (or, for that matter, Japanese soldiers who don’t look suspiciously Filipino and Chinese) look elsewhere, but if you’re looking for a gritty war movie that delivers the goods, Objective, Burma! fits the bill.